Celebrity Autobiography fine-tunes its satire of
the least-accomplished memoirs.

Kristen
Johnson reads at a recent performance.

A
long-running series in both New York and Los Angeles, Celebrity
Autobiography is revving up another New York run at the Triad Theater on
the Upper West Side. Seen February 25, the show features an eclectic mix
of SNL players (former and current) and New York theater and film
fixtures, reading a repertoire of preposterous and self-absorbed B-list
celebrity bios.

A few autobiographies seem to be staples of the show, like Mr. T, Vanna
White, Marilu Henner and Burt Reynolds, with varying success. The newest
personality with an autobiography read in this performance was Star
Jones.

The matches of performer and autobiography met with varied degrees of
success, all within the same show. The most effective pairings were
Richard Kind reading Vanna White and Claudia Shear reading Ivana Trump,
although show creator Eugene Pack also had lots of fun with Neil
Sedakaís recitation of his dietary habits, and Rachel Dratch played up
the cluelessness of former Good Morning America host Joan Lunden quite
nicely.

Kind energetically punctuated each point White made about the routine of
being the Wheel of Fortune letter turner, ever more loudly as though it
were the account of a battle in a war. And Shear captured the
haughtiness of Ivana Trump and her utter conviction in absurd opinions,
such as field hockey not being a good sport for girls and ducks making
excellent pets.

On this night, Celebrity Autobiography climaxed with two tour de force
reads featuring multiple performers taking turns reading dialogue from
three or four related biographies all at once, like Burt Reynolds, Loni
Anderson and those of Burtís assistant and Loniís other lover; as well
as the biographies chronicling the love triangle of Eddie Fisher,
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (and Fisherís jilted wife, Debbie
Reynolds).

In the first of these tabloid sagas, Michael McKean delivered deadpan
some of the best Burt Reynolds passages in the melodrama of his time
with Loni Anderson -- while Kristen Johnson relished Loniís lines.
Dratch proved a perfect counterpoint reading the autobiography of Burtís
assistant (yes, a publisher apparently actually printed that). And in
the second, Kind had the perfect vehicle for declarations rising in
volume as none other than Richard Burton, who exclaims of poor Eddie
Fisher, ďIíll fuck him myself!Ē

As you can see, Celebrity Autobiography is clearly a very entertaining
evening, with lots of laughs to be had, particularly because of how some
of its best matches of cast and material play out, as they deftly
inflate or underplay some of the egotistical absurdities of the source
(ahem) literature.